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snapped sleepily.
Fafhrd stopped turning the gem and one of its beams blinked directly at the
Mouser. The later shivered, for he had for a moment the sharp conviction that the
gem was looking at him with evil intelligence. But Fafhrd obediently tucked the
gem away with a laugh-and-a-yawn and cloaked himself up for sleep. Gradually
the Mouser's eerie feelings and realistic fears were both lulled as he watched the
dancing flames, and he drowsed off.
The Mouser's next conscious sensations were of being tossed roughly down
onto thick grass that felt unpleasantly like fur. His head ached splittingly and
there was a pulsing yellow-purple glow, shot through with blinding gleams. It was
a few moments before he realized that all these lights were outside his skull
rather than inside it.
He lifted his head to look around and agonizing pain shot through it.
However, he persisted and shortly found out where he was.
He was lying on the hillocky, dark-vegetated shore across the acid-seeming
lake from the green hill. The night sky was live with northern lights, while from
the mouthlike slit -- now open wider -- in the green hill's pinkish top, a red smoke
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came in puffs like a man eagerly panting and heaving. All the hill's green flank-
faces seemed monstrously alive in the mixed lights, their mouths twitching and
their eyes flashing -- as if every one of them held an eye-diamond. Only a few feet
away from the Mouser, Fafhrd stood stiffly behind the stubby pillar of rock,
which was indeed a carved altar of some sort, topped by a great bowl. The
Northerner was chanting something in a grunty language the Mouser didn't know
and had never heard Fafhrd use.
The Mouser struggled to a sitting position. Gingerly feeling his skull, he found
a large lump over his right ear. At the same time Fafhrd struck sparks --
apparently with stone and steel -- above the bowl, and a pillar of purple flame
shot up from it, and the Mouser saw that Fafhrd's eyes were tight shut and that in
his hand he held the diamond eye.
Then the Mouser realized that the diamond eye had been far wiser than the
black priests who had served its mountain-idol. They, like many priests, had been
much too fanatical and not nearly as clever as the god they served. While they
had sought to rescue the filched eye and destroy the blasphemous thieves who
had stolen it, the eye had taken care of itself very nicely. It had enchanted Fafhrd
and deceived him into taking a circling course that would lead him and the
Mouser back to the vengeful green hill. It had even speeded up the last stage of
the journey, forcing Fafhrd to move by night, carrying the Mouser with him after
stunning him in his sleep with a dangerously heavy blow.
Also, the diamond eye must have been more foresighted and purposeful than
its priests. It must have some important end in view, over and beyond that of
getting itself returned to its mountain-idol. Otherwise, why should it have
instructed Fafhrd to preserve the Mouser carefully and bring him along? The
diamond eye must have some use for both of them. Through the Mouser's aching
brain reverberated the phrase he remembered Fafhrd muttering two nights
before: "But it needs the blood of heroes before it can shape itself into the form of
men."
As all these thoughts were seething painfully in the Mouser's brain, he saw
Fafhrd coming toward him with diamond eye in one hand and drawn longsword
in the other, but a winning smile on his blind face.
"Come, Mouser," Fafhrd said gently, "it is time we crossed the lake and
climbed the hill and received the kiss and sweet suck of the topmost lips and
mingled our blood with the hot blood of Nehwon. In that way we will live on in
the stony rock-giants about to be born, and know with them the joy of crushing
cities and trampling armies and stamping on all cultivated fields."
These mad phrases stung the Mouser into action, unintimidated by the
pulsing lights of sky and hill. He jerked Scalpel from its scabbard and sprang at
Fafhrd, engaging the longsword and making a particularly clever disarming
thrust-and-twist guaranteed to send the longsword spinning from Fafhrd's hand -
- especially since the Northerner still had his eyes closed tight. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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